HPA Day #2: In-Venue VOD

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Live sporting events are eating
themselves. There’s more and more competition between the venue and the home. A
stadium in Kansas City is addressing the problem by combining the two. James
Stellpflug of EVS provided an overview at the HPA Technology Retreat on
Wednesday.

First, some figures from a January 2012
Cisco survey:
—74 percent of fans want to see more big screen HD
content throughout the venue.
—45 percent said they would pay more
if HD video was available throughout the venue.
—41 percent say
they’d like to be able to see alternate camera angles than what they can see
from their seat view.

However, Stellpflug said, streaming
alone is of little added value to a fan in a venue. So, how do you get other
camera angles to fans, any time they want it?

One early
approach was renting out custom devices in the venue—not very successful. Fans want
to stay within their own device, Stellpflug said. They are already using their
own device before arriving at the stadium.

Sporting Park
in Kansas City, an 18,500-seat, sold-out stadium that’s home of the MLS team
Sporting KC, has employed in-venue video-on-demand to get soccer fans to leave
their couches.

The park created a team app called
“Uphoria,” which uses the EVS C-Cast API and is supported through Cisco’s
Stadium Vision and Stadium Vision Mobile over robust Wi-Fi. Content is hosted
and delivered as VOD.

Content can come from existing EVS
Replay Servers, or from the control room or from the truck, Stellpflug said. Within
the stadium, they used a server with a multicamera replay model. The EVS IPDirector
manages extraction of content, which is transcoded to mezzanine H.264.

“The key is that content gets called out live,” Stellpflug
said. “The goal was to pull content and deliver it within 20 seconds of the
action on the field. Fans want to see clips as quickly as possible. It may be
irrelevant to them two minutes later. Remaining multicamera angles arrive just
after.”

A cloud element provides the ability to manage
the content remotely and deliver the content elsewhere, or introduce content
into the in-venue app in a bi-directional workflow.
Using Wi-Fi presents a potential chokepoint for larger venues, Stellpflug said.
Sporting Park estimated that around 5,000 of the team’s 18,000 fans were in the
app during the game, but they weren’t sure how many were rolling clips and
when.

“You can’t guarantee that bandwidth,” he said. “We’re
exploring other methods to deliver the content, like perhaps pushing clips to
the app.”